When you have stepped away from both sides of the argument, the equation, there is no algebra available to solve. Sides are irrelevant, and all that's left is nothing but that which will satisfy the self. The test will be on the inside, not the outside.

Were getting into post-modernism now and I'm a little drunk. The implicit supposition in stepping away from both sides of the argument is that truth is an illusion, which is the message this McKenna guy seems to be peddling. But without that objectivity, though I'll grant you Godel's theorem, morality ceases to have meaning

A Psychedelic Point of View - Terence McKenna
“A Psychedelic Point of View”
Terence McKenna
*Source – The Psychedelic Salon - 378
**Transcribed by DominatorCulture.com for readability and grammar.
This is the third opportunity to talk to the community at these Wednesday night lectures. I figure we have about 25 years before this information will become completely assimilated into the encroaching consumer society; the leveling of values that seems now to be an inevitable part of the globalizing of society. On one level its very good, we recognize ourselves in our enemies and there’s a commonality of values generated, but on another level its tremendously destructive of novelty and uniqueness. I mean -*‐ we’re turning the whole planet into a white bread, mall shopping culture and the values of every other way of doing things is being subsumed to that.
I talked a lot in these Wednesday night lectures about the importance of partnership societies in the human past and how the nostalgia for these social arrangements have driven us throughout our experience of history. Well it is nevertheless true today that even in the Amazon and in perhaps a few other “relic’d” environments, partnership societies exist, and partnership societies thrive and regulate themselves through a symbiotic relationship to plants. We call this hallucinogenic plant shamanism but it is actually almost a welding of the social organism into the natural surround, in a way that feeds back into the psyches of these people and the structures of their society that is very much promotes the conservation of equilibrium. This is something that we have sadly lost touch with.
So it’s very important to preserve the options that have been discovered by people over the millennia. The options that allow a recreation of the sensory and psychic ratios that characterize the partnership society in contrast to the kind of dominator culture society that we’ve lived under for such a long. So it simply isn’t a matter of preserving plants for medicines, it’s really much more philosophically deep than that. It’s the idea that a relationship to the vegetable matrix of the planet is what constitutes a Gaian resurgence. That it is plants that regulate the composition of the atmosphere, the temperatures of the ocean, so forth and so on, and that it is our lack of integration into that system that has precipitated the crises of toxic twentieth century potlatch civilization.

By potlatch, potlatch was a custom of the northwest coast Indians where they would, to show there wealth, destroy huge amounts of material, so that houses would be burned, feathered blankets burned, totems poles burned – all burned in the potlatch. It was an orgy of destruction, which proves your wealth and we have assimilated and perfected this custom so that it is second nature to us. The whole

planet is a vast potlatch. We are robbing our children and their children of any sort of recognizable future by basically grabbing it all for ourselves. No other society in history has been so callous to human values that it condemned generations of its own unborn children to live in the desert. This is the main thing I think that comes out of an effort to formulate a psychedelic point of view, and I take it this is what we, the psychedelic community, have been involved in.
A psychedelic point of view means a point of view that honors consciousness. Consciousness is seen as the value to be maximized. That’s what we want. We want more consciousness, better integration, better information, and better models. We don’t want to petrify ourselves, or commit ourselves to a model that is then found to be obsolete and inadequate. What chiefly constitutes the psychedelic point of view is its open-*‐ended and provisional nature, as opposed to every other ideology or point of view that is running around. What the psychedelic point of view is -*‐ is a kind of cultural relativism. We’re trying to get a grip on who and where we are in the cosmos, from a point of view not that of the American consumerist citizen. We’re looking for something else, something larger, deeper, broader, more touched by the cosmic, more touched by a sense of the past, and of destiny.
I have said this many times but I want to say it now in a slightly different context and discuss it. Consider the statement of the British enzymologist, J B S Haldane, who discovered enzymes, so he became an enzymologist -*‐-*‐ a logical move. Haldane said “the world is not only stranger that we suppose, it is stranger than we can suppose.” This is something that we have not entertained very seriously as a possibility, especially the cheerful characters in the white coats with the clipboards.
The assumption has always been that Man’s mind; notice the gender slant, Man’s mind, is sufficient for the cognition of the cosmos. This is not all that surprising, though it is patently idiotic. It is not all that surprising when you think about the fact that as recently as let’s say 1830, people believed the earth was 4000 years old. As recently as 1480, the new world was unsuspected to exist, or rather, it was suspected by a few wild-*‐eyed mapmakers and mad sailors. Conventional knowledge held that the Eurasian landmass in connection with Africa was all that existed.
So when we look back into our recent past, we discover tremendous epistemic naïveté. That means people didn’t know what was going on. They weren’t even close. Yet we are asked to believe that somewhere after Darwin, and before now, it was all figured out. Now we view the universe from a lofty pinnacle of integrated understanding. Physics explains biology, biology explains culture, and culture explains sociology, so forth and so on. This is really whistling past the graveyard, because meanwhile, the visible consequences of this understanding are: spreading chaos, disillusion of values, an inability to control technology, an inability to set reasonable political goals, such as moderation of population growth, and carry them out. Somehow this deep insight into how everything works has left everything
a mess. And you know, what does that mean about us? Why is that and what can be done about it?
I think the problem is that we have too long ignored the possibility that reality is stranger than we can suppose. Let this reverberate in your mind. That means no model will ever work. It means it will always be provisional. That the understanding of what it is will always recede ahead of any epistemic program to describe, enclose, or explain. This is all a fallacy, especially if you believe that you are embarked on a finite project where eventually you will issue a white paper and that will explain how the boar at the cabbage. It’s not to be explained.
We have, because of unique characteristics of the male ego, chosen to operate with the assumption that we can understand -*‐ that the human mind can in fact ‘grok’ larger and larger levels of embeddedness and somehow make sense of them. What the psychedelic experience, number one, and point of view, number two, is saying is that we have the means at hand to completely explode this nonsensical fiction of certitude. Yet we chose not to confront it.
This is why I first proposed calling this talk ‘Facing the Answer’, because the answer about how you understand the universe is the same answer that you get when you ask the question, how am I to understand my own life? It can’t be understood. It is a receding mystery. It is a continuing carrot. It cannot be brought under the aegis of rational apprehension. It says in Moby Dick, “reality outran apprehension.” It always outruns apprehension because apprehension is the primitive functioning of the primate neural network. What is reality? Who knows? Who would even care to take a guess? It’s a mystery. You do not measure the depth of the universal mystery with the neural network of a primate. Our role is not to understand but to appreciate. We have an immense capacity for resonance with beauty for aesthetic awareness, appreciation of form, and appreciation of how things go together. Take notice of this word -*‐ appreciation.
If you don’t know what’s going on at a dinner party, in a corporation or in an environment, then the best course is to keep your mouth shut, pay attention and try to appreciate the situation. It’s ridiculous to attempt to seize the tiller of reality because we don’t even know where we want to go.
The notion that by creating these models of reality, which are not acknowledged as models but which are called scientific truth, we betray ourselves down the primrose path that leads to dreary, dusty death. Because what we do is take the poetry out of being. We extract the poetry from being by the assumption of the mundane. The ‘banality of modernity’ is what I call this. The steady flattening of values, so that nothing means much.
We lose our sense of outrage over political mistreatment of the underprivileged, or the sense of outrage as a society slips towards the abyss, or the sense of outrage when people mistreat you is muted. Everything is flattened by the
banality of modernity. This is the heritage of all the bad little boys of the 18th century: Nietzsche, Darwin, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. These clowns were on a bad trip and they were loud about it. What they give us is a universe devoid of soul. Man looms larger and larger, notice the gender slant. Man looms larger and larger in the picture, and what this ushers us into is fascism, pure and simple.
This view is not surprising because this calling forth of the image of man into larger and larger perspective has been the program of monotheism for 3000 years. It has been a relentless accentuation of the centrality of the human image -*‐ the male dominant human image. In the transmutation of Hellenistic Judaism that becomes Christianity, the final apotheosis of this point of view is created in the notion that man can be god. That’s it, and it is hailed as the tremendous infusion of existential validity into the human image. It’s hailed as the greatest single stride ever taken in the definition of human ontology.
I would like to suggest to you that it was the greatest backward step ever taken because what it did was shove Nature further and further into the background. “Nature is something from which we torment her secrets.” This is Francis Bacon. We torture nature to obtain her secrets. The world is created for Man, and it is for Man to remake into his image – all this gender stuff.
Building on that foundation, 19th century rationalism thought it was putting these things behind it. It conceived itself as anti-*‐clerical, as anti-*‐monotheistic and anti-*‐Christian in some sense. Yet what it really did was just strip away the Baroque trappings. Hans Jonas was very acute in pointing out that 3rd century Hellenistic Gnosticism and Heideggerian philosophy are essentially the same thing. It’s just that in the Gnostic recension, you get all these sexy things: demons, angels, levels, the emanation from the Pleroma, and the clash of the archons. You get Opera.
In the Heideggerian recension, they’ve just gotten down to the nitty-*‐gritty but the message is the same. Man is thrown into the unknown. Man is in the abyss, lost. All meaning must come from within. All order must come from an inner vision. “We are abandoned.” This is Heideggerian language. This view is permission then, for pathology because it is a point of view purchased at the cost of ignoring the facts of the matter.
That, in my definition, is a delusion. A point of view purchased at the expense of the facts of the matter. Whitehead said that there are certain stubborn facts. You can reduce and reduce all you want, but always there are certain stubborn facts. One of them is the primacy of Nature, a stubborn fact that was ignored by this tradition.
Once nature is taken as the ground of being, then the permission to inflate the image of the ego is denied. And I think this is happening globally, very slowly, under pressure, under duress, because our backs are to the wall. We are seeing a planetary crisis unfold before our eyes and blame has not yet come into the rhetoric.
But eventually it going be understood who’s to blame, and it isn’t the tribesman of New Guinea or the Indians of Siberia. It is Western, Male, Scientific, Technological Hubris that has claimed center stage like a noisy drunk, and then just preceded to hold us all prisoner, while it acted out a process that is rooted in its own traumatic birth, in the sundering of the symbiotic relationship to the vegetable matrix that characterized prehistory.
Well – so what I’m offering as a counterpoise to that, is this notion of provisional models. Nature is not mute. This is what Satre said, nature is mute. He was another one of these people who pushed this existential line in one form or another.
Nature is not mute. Nature is full of affection and intentionality toward humankind. But intuition must be given prominence in the rearrangement of our relationship with the world. I talked the other night about induction and intuition, and I want to say a little bit more about it tonight. Different things. Science runs on induction, which is a very low-*‐grade form of logic. It means you do something over and over again and if it happens the same way 100 times, you have confidence that the 101st time, it will happen the same way. Intuition doesn’t work like that. Intuition as I said the other night, leaves no trial. And most of us are accustomed to thinking of intuition as something feminine, mysterious, unexplainable and sort of magical. And also I think, because we live in a male-*‐dominant society, we undervalue it. If someone claims intuition, our position is probably one of prove it. Doubt in the face of the face of the assertion, you see.
But there is an interesting thing about intuition that I don’t think many people understand or have bothered to look at. Which is, did you know. I bet you did know. Mathematics is based on intuition. Now, half of Mathematics would rise with a screech of horror at this statement, but the other half of mathematics calls itself intuitional mathematics. OK, well now what’s going on here?
Probably if you are not a professional philosopher of science, you are accustomed to associating mathematics with science rather closely. This is because science, in order to give itself legitimacy, has very slyly appropriated mathematics, especially in the 20th century, to its purposes. But if we talk about what is called pure mathematics, which is the great love of mathematicians. The other kind of mathematics is applied mathematics, and thats for engineers and technologists and is not what moves them to the edge of their chair. But if we think about, pure mathematics, it is an activity carried on in the mind, based on, deductive truth. Deductive, not inductive.
In other words, a statement is made. It can be anything. All greys are non-*‐X. This is just a statement, we don’t yet know what this is going to be about. All greys are non-*‐ X. All greens are F-*‐Sub-*‐1. What we’re putting in place are a set of statements that appear nonsensical, but what we will assert is, that we should seek a relationship between them and that will then show us something. And this is how mathematics really works. It has very little to do with number. It has to do with the
conceptualizing of relationships. Conceptualizing them, and then exploring your intuition about these conceptions, and then the third and very late stage, is you write a formal statement of your cognitive activity around these assumptions.
So you see, mathematics is entirely intuitional. It leaves no track. It is drawn from this other domain. Well, why has it been appropriated by science? Well, for a very funny and not well-*‐understood reason. Mathematics has been appropriated by science because mathematics has an uncanny ability to describe nature. Completely uncanny. Now you may have never asked yourself, why is mathematics such a powerful tool for the description of nature? Maybe you thought that somebody else can answer this and that it’s not a problem. Well – I’ve got news for you. It is a problem.
Nobody has any good ideas about why mathematics describes nature. But notice that mathematics is an intuitional activity. An intuitional activity describes nature, without the intercession of inductive science. Inductive science is a kind of a naïve holdover from Greek Democritian theories, where everything is conceived of as clearly conceivable, and operating according to known laws. But in fact, the deeper structure of nature is not modeled out of an examination of data obtained by measurement. That isn’t how it works these days. The deeper description of nature is achieved by taking weird objects from the frontiers of mathematics. These things dreamed up in the confines and depths of the human mind and inside computers, and then laying them over nature. And seeing my gosh, there is a one to one correspondence, between let us say – the multidimensional catastrophes described by Rene Tom, and the dripping of a faucet, the turbulence in a brook, the voting patterns in a Ghetto. All of these things are seen to be easily modeled by extremely exotic mathematical objects discovered through intuition within the mind.
Well what does this mean? Well it means, if it means anything – before we draw the deeper conclusion – what is the conclusion on the surface? It must be that the unaided human mind is more capable of correctly modeling nature, than the human mind that works through the methodological inductive approach called Science. And in fact – this is clearly true because the world described by science, a scientific description of this room, would say very little about all the important things going on in it. A scientific description of this room would leave out personality, would leave out linguistic intent, would leave out the uniqueness of each of us. For science we are merely members of the human species. Again, this flattening, this reductionism. This betrayal of the quintessence of the phenomenon, in a desperate effort to achieve closure in the modeling process. And so then you do achieve closure, but then the model is always inadequate.
So then there’s this sense of frustration. We can’t get closure with the model unless we tell a lie. Unless we deny the complexity, the interrelatedness, the soulness, the spiritness, the mindfulness, all of these things are for science, what are called secondary properties. They are epi-*‐phenomenal. They are only an aspect of your point of view. Like an iridescence on a butterfly’s wing, or something like that. In
fact, that is the classic reductionist definition of consciousness. It is an iridescence that appears on the surface of neural processing, that we mistake for true being.
And yet, somehow we are embedded within this iridescence and it from within this iridescence that we launch the descriptive models that then deny our existential validity. Well so this has been an animistic exercise, and there must be others.
So then what is the path of intuition in relationship to nature that is different from the path of Science. In a way, it is only a shift of emphasis. William Blake said, ‘attend the minute particulars.’ This is very good advise for science, and it is very good advice for mathematics, and what I’m suggesting here tonight is that we have misconstrued mathematics and have bought the notion that it a part of science. When actually it stands ready to empower intuition and to sweep science, if not away, at least in to a more proper role more befitting it’s extremely limited application to the higher orders of reality that we really care about.
I mean science is really the plumbing level of reality. It doesn’t catch the integrated nature of language, the evolution of fairy tale, the dynamics of love affairs, the quintessence of genius. These are the things that as human beings structure and constellate and guide and inform our world, and science has nothing to say about these things. Mathematics on the other hand is like the bedrock celebration of these things. It empowers intuition; it discovers intuition to be the most powerful epistemic tool that we have. More powerfiul that induction, more powerful than deduction. Intuition is the unifying of experience into a Gestalt image of the world. A coming together within the organism of a correct imaging of the world. Now what do I mean by a correct imaging? All I mean is a provisional image that carries you to the next moment. This is all we can hope for at this stage.
We are much more suited for dancing than for whatever it is that we have been doing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t dancing. We are a part of nature, we are a part of light, we are a part of the energy field of the planet. We are not its keeper in the sense that, it is not given unto us to understand it. That was all a horrible misunderstanding. The idea that we should understand reality and then somehow make something of it. Alfred North Whitehead said ‘that understanding is the apperception of pattern as such.’ As such, that’s all – so here we have a room full of people. Well – it’s a pattern, its many patterns. It’s the pattern of how men and women are mixed together statistically as we scan from left to right. If I see a pattern there, I know something about the crowd. I understand something about the crowd. The pattern tells me something and I call that understanding.
But we could analyze the crowd from the point of view of the distribution of young people and old people, or people in colors in the red/blue spectrum as according to the yellow/white spectrum. Each one of these things is a way of analyzing the pattern in the room, and each one of these patterns tells the perceiver more about what is going on in the room. Because the room is not a distribution of young people and old people, a distribution of men and women, or a distribution of garment colors – the room is a mystery. A recessional mystery, that presents itself
as a series of interlocking patterns of infinite depth. And so in building collective epistemologies, this is what we must ask of these epistemologies, that they give us the experience of understanding. And the experience of understanding is largely intuitional.
How much of an experience of understanding do you have when you examine what you examine what modern physics is saying about the origin of the universe. I submit – not much, because it is so clearly the product of abstraction. The product of the phonetic alphabet, the male ego, they set all the interesting stuff back in the first three minutes – who can go and look?
It’s all stacked against empowering the perceiver. You can’t even check the statements these people are making unless you happen to have a 125 million dollar colliding bevatron or something, and the understanding to use it, and interpret the results. So what we have is priesthood, off on the edge of things, propounding great profundities that nowhere touch the heart. Nowhere empower the individual, nowhere strengthen the diade, or reinforce the family, or give support to the downtrodden. It doesn’t seem to be about that. In other words, the explanation of the world is not a human explanation. A human explanation must come from intuition. It must come from poetry, it must come ultimately from experience, and by experience, I don’t mean the experimental method of science, which is that things are pulled apart, taken down to their lowest common denominator and then described. That’s like believing you understand Los Angeles, if you have the telephone directory.
This is the level of genetics today. They say they understand life and they have the telephone directory, and their talking about Los Angeles because they can look up where the genes are, the coding for the proteins. Does this tell us anything about a broken heart? Or a messiah, or a Hitler? I don’t think so.
So -*‐ what we are trying to do is return the focus of attention to individual experience. We have been slaved to long to ideology transmitted hierarchically, and based on a tremendously alienating instrumentality. That’s what science depends on now, a tremendously alienating instrumentality. What we need to do is empower experience. This is where the psychedelics come in, because citizens don’t take psychedelics, because it’s illegal. Neither do marionettes, neither do robots. None of these well-*‐behaved and mechanistic reductionist images of humanity take psychedelics. Because it’s misbehaving. Misbehaving is a great sin. In fact is enshrined as the first sin.
You’ll regard that the psychedelic issue was there in Eden, and somebody misbehaved and then they got tossed out forever, and their children’s children into the chaos of history. It’s interesting to read in Genesis why this was. It was because they will become as we are, says Yahweh, if they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. I suggest to you that this is precisely what we should seek to do and that this ‘we’ is the voice of hierarchy, the voice of paternalism, the voice of the male
ego finally right up into the storm god, the volcano god who lies back there in the origins of monotheism. We empower our experience by insisting on our authenticity. It is a wonderful thing to learn to be able to standup and yell bullshit.
I did it first when I was about 18 years old and it was the meme of the hour. It blew their minds; it did blow their minds. It was uncivil, it lacked polity; it was rude and crude and correct. Because so much is being slung and nobody is talking about the primacy of experience and the dignity of the individual. We went a long way with this in America before we betrayed it. And it wasn’t only betrayed by the clowns in Washington. It’s also betrayed by anybody who clusters themselves around the feet of some self-*‐proclaimed nabob. Because the fact of the matter is, nobody knows what’s going on. Nobody knows. Nobody has the faintest idea. The best guesses are lies, you may be sure of it. So to pretend that one human being will lead another out of the dark night of ignorance and into the shining light of truth is ludicrous. Absolutely grotesque.
A product of this empowering of the human image; that has gone on through several thousand years of dominator culture. If you want a teacher, try a waterfall, or a mushroom, or a mountain wilderness, or a storm pounded seashore. This is where the action is. It’s not back in the hive, it’s not in the anthill, it’s not knocking your head against the floor in front of somebody who claims that because of their lineage and who’s feet they washed, and whose feet they washed, that you should give credence to them.
Knowledge is provisional and we are yet to approach even the first moment of civilized understanding. The way it is to be done is by trusting yourself, trusting your intuition. Reject authority. Authority is a lie and an abomination. Authority will lead you into ruin. It’s not real, and it isn’t – don’t get the idea that it’s this liberal rap about how everybody has a piece of the action. The Jews know something, the Buddhists know something, the Huichol know something. Nonsense, rubbish, nobody knows anything. These are different kinds of shell games that have been worked out by priestly castes of people to keep things under control. Institutions seek to maximize control. That’s what their into.
Did you think that they were in the business of enlightening you? Saving your soul? Forget it. Control is what this is all about.
And to the degree that we commit ourselves to ideology, we are poisoned. Any ideology -*‐ Marxism, Catholicism, Objectivism, you name it. Rubbish – all rubbish. What is real is experience. What is real is this moment, and so then what it becomes about –what are the frontiers of experience?
How much of that has been taken away from us by these dominators? By these priesthoods, by these cults, by these philosophical shell games. Well – a lot. That’s the whole story of history. Our growing unease, our growing disease. Our malaise, is all about the fact that we are kept from the wellspring of experience. We are
sexually repressed, you may not feel – but look back 100 years to a time when Pianos wore pants. Maybe we’ve made a little progress on the sexual thing, maybe not. Maybe more or less than we think. But we are repressed in all of these areas.
And we are particularly repressed in the area that relates to the psychedelic experience. It is raid to the dominator insect invasion. They can’t take it. They can’t stand it. Because it empowers the individual, it dissolves the cheerful model of science. It’s just exposed as a nice story. It enriches it accessible universe 10 fold, 100 fold, 1000 fold. It makes the individual complete within himself or herself; and this completion of the individual is extremely destructive to the plan of the dominators, which is that you will be a cog in the machine. You will participate in the life of an organization. Not your life – the life of an organization. You will go to some bullshit job, you will pour the best years of your life and your genius and your hopes into this. You will serve an institution. You will serve, serve, serve, serve.
Well – it’s a bad idea for free people to go a long with this. A much better idea would be to insist on the dignity of human beings. To recognize that the freeing of slaves, the giving of the vote to women, the ending of public whippings. That this program of political enlightenment must also then include hands off on how people want to relate to changing their minds. We are not interested in being sexually regulated by the state, and we are not interested in being intellectually, spiritually, emotionally manipulated by the state. The state should stand down in this issue. The state is acting as the enforcing arm of the dominator culture. Specifically, of fundamentalist screwballs, who are horrified by all this. By the notion that people would claim the authenticity of their own minds. That people would stand in the light of nature and reject original sin and the guilt from Eden, and the sins of the fathers, and all this rubbish which is handed down.
What the archaic revival is going to have to mean if it has teeth, is a re-*‐empowering of the individual, and a consequent lowering of the profile of institutions, especially government. We need to think about these things, because we have bought into the idea that we have to serve, and behave, and be enslaved, else chaos will engulf the world.
We need to carry out our analysis of the situation to the point where we can embrace chaos. And see that chaos is the environment in which we all thrive. That’s how I’ve done it for years. You think I could have lived like this, gotten away with this in the Soviet Union. I don’t think so. I require a society on the brink of social breakdown, to be able to do my work. And I think a society on the brink of social breakdown is the healthiest situation for individuals.
I don’t know how many of you have ever had the privilege of being in a society in a pre-*‐revolutionary situation, but the cafés stay open all night, and there’s music in the streets, and you can breath it, you can feel it, and you know what is happening. The dominator is being pushed, it never succeeds, it’s never able to claim itself, but on the other hand, history is young. We may have a crack at this. A global society is
coming into being. A global society made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but which is ours. Through the mistaken invention and distribution of small computers, the printing press, all of this stuff.
Information is power and information has been spilled by the clumsy handling of the cybernetic revolution by the dominator culture so that it is everywhere. Never has the situation been more fluid. Never have the opportunities for infiltration, insurrection and hell raising been more present at hand, but we have to seize the opportunity, because the world doesn’t have that much more to run, unless someone begins to shake the apple cart. If we don’t begin to shake the apple cart, then the apple cart is just going to sail over the cliff and be lost.
So the psychedelics are very hot in this because they dissolve boundaries, they dissolve assumptions. And our task, our being everyone who seeks self-*‐ empowerment through experience, our task is to dissolve the assumptions of the dominator culture and make it impossible for it to work. I think this is already happening. We have nature on our side, you see. Nature is beginning to kick up, and it may alarm you that they’re cutting down the Amazon rainforest, but imagine if you were the clown who owns it, how alarmed he is. He sees it as an investment. He thinks he owns it, and when he sees that it’s being destroyed, he’s extremely alarmed.
The fact that nature is itself being seen as a limited resource is tremendous tilt to our side. Because the provisional model psychedelic open-*‐ended partnership way of doing things is the only style that can perhaps seize the controls of this sinking submarine and get it back to the surface, so that we can figure out what should be done.
If we continue as we have, then we’re doomed. And the judgment of some higher power on that will be ‘they didn’t even struggle.’ They went to the boxcars with their suitcases and they didn’t even struggle. This is too nightmarish to contemplate. We’re talking about the fate of a whole planet. Why are people so polite? Why are they so patient? Why are they so patient? Why are they so forgiving of gangsterism and betrayal? It’s very difficult to understand.
I believe that it’s because the dominator culture is increasingly more and more sophisticated in its perfection of subliminal mechanisms of control. And I don’t mean anything grandiose and paranoid, I just mean that through press releases and sound bites and the enforced idiocy of television, the drama of a dying world has been turned into a soap opera for most people. And they don’t understand that it’s their story, and they will eat it in the final act if somewhere between here and the final act they don’t stand up on their hind legs and howl.
So – this whole effort to bring the psychedelic experience back into prominence is an effort to empower individuals. And to get them to see that we are bled of our authenticity by vampirish institutions that will never of their own accord, leave us alone. There must be a moment when the machinery and the working of the machinery becomes so odious that people are willing to strive forward and throw sand on the tracks and force a re-*‐evaluation of the situation. It’s not done through organizing, its not done through vanguard parties of intellectual elites. It’s done through just walking away from all that. Claiming your identity, claiming your vision, your being, your intuition, and then acting from that without regret. Cleanly, without regret.

"Well it is nevertheless true today that even in the Amazon and in perhaps a few other “relic’d” environments, partnership societies exist, and partnership societies thrive and regulate themselves through a symbiotic relationship to plants."

Here he is denying the hierarchical structure of the animal kingdom which all animals down to the insects organize themselves by.

Were getting into post-modernism now and I'm a little drunk. The implicit supposition in stepping away from both sides of the argument is that truth is an illusion, which is the message this McKenna guy seems to be peddling. But without that objectivity, though I'll grant you Godel's theorem, morality ceases to have meaning

Truth is not an illusion, but undefinable by the hive of either side. Both sides of any argument are wrong. If they weren't, there wouldn't be a fight. There wouldn't be a violent tit for tat.

Absolutely incorrect. The implicit argument in that fighting is contingent upon incorrect stances presupposes tabula rasa, that is that each individual is a blank slate. This is demonstrably untrue. Beethoven came from parents who beat him and who had no musical talent whatsoever and yet he was a musical colossus. Another child may come from the best breeding and be given every opportunity in life and still fuck it up in every way.

But this is problematized by the same psychological response of each party to the encountering of a system of values not readily compatible with their own

Absolutely incorrect. The implicit argument in that fighting is contingent upon incorrect stances presupposes tabula rasa, that is that each individual is a blank slate. This is demonstrably untrue. Beethoven came from parents who beat him and who had no musical talent whatsoever and yet he was a musical colossus. Another child may come from the best breeding and be given every opportunity in life and still fuck it up in every way.

But this is problematized by the same psychological response of each party to the encountering of a system of values not readily compatible with their own

I think you should find some DMT. Smoking is the easiest way, but a good oral concoction would really do you some good. Living the apparent life here we have available is not enough.

"If you don’t know what’s going on at a dinner party, in a corporation or in an environment, then the best course is to keep your mouth shut, pay attention and try to appreciate the situation. It’s ridiculous to attempt to seize the tiller of reality because we don’t even know where we want to go"

and

"So to pretend that one human being will lead another out of the dark night of ignorance and into the shining light of truth is ludicrous"

In addition if that last statement is true than what the hell is he even doing speaking? What's the point of language? If human beings are incapable of communion why have language at all? Why write novels?

and more to the point if you have to resort to drugs for a good life or for experience then your life is lacking. Go traveling. April I'll be in Serbia. Come June I will be embarking on a horse ride from Astana to Almaty. You're more than welcome to come along. I need bodies to eat if we end up getting lost in the steppe.

Absolutely incorrect. The implicit argument in that fighting is contingent upon incorrect stances presupposes tabula rasa, that is that each individual is a blank slate. This is demonstrably untrue. Beethoven came from parents who beat him and who had no musical talent whatsoever and yet he was a musical colossus. Another child may come from the best breeding and be given every opportunity in life and still fuck it up in every way.

But this is problematized by the same psychological response of each party to the encountering of a system of values not readily compatible with their own

Every so often the universe throws up a flower amongst the weeds. Beethoven's genius proves nothing I haven't already said. I believe you are missing the point.

It's very simple. The map is not the territory, and it never will be, at least not in any way we will ever be able to imagine from the place we are now. The best answer to the the question: 'what comes next?', is: I don't know. Because analysis (scientific, political, cultural, historical, mathematical, scientific, spiritual, esoteric, et al) is just system building, and systems are just maps. Yes, they are helpful in our day to day lives, but none (or all) are the full picture; from here, we can't see the whole picture. That is why we are competitive, nationalistic, patriotic, self-serving, violent, and I would add, neurotic, nervous, uncomfortable, disconnected from one another, vengeful, jealous, hateful, greedy, and all kinds of other words I'm sure you can imagine.

Language is also an incomplete system, so there is no language for what is really happening, even if one or more of us knew what reality was. Brilliant artists and philosophers can point at it, or a portion or attribute of it, but that's all. Even if the truth could be understood, it couldn't be conveyed in a meaningful way with our current set of tools. As our tools get more advanced and complex, we get no closer to it. The belief that we are getting closer to the truth fuels the seeking, but also creates more of the same useless complexity, division, competitiveness, etc.

This way of thinking can be easily dismissed by many many maps as the suicide question, or silly misdirection, or defeatism, or gobbledy-gook, and hocus-pocus. Some theists would say that it points to a God or creator, but none of these answers explain fully what is happening.

We are part of something that is moving in an unquantifiable way. If an oppressive system tries to stamp it out or hold it down it will still keep moving. Yes, we can kill and bind and lay a dragnet over what we think it is that's the problem, but the flowers will always pop-up and defy our attempts.

Name one oppressive system that worked? I mean, that is still working? Hell, name ANY system in history that has not failed. And as we get more technologically advanced, they work for shorter and shorter amounts of time.

Furthermore, this perspective allows for a much more enjoyable experience of reality. It is by no means some enlightenment, as 'enlightenment' is only another concept dreamt-up by our desire to organize possibilities and systems, and our inability to fully understand what the few who've expressed such ideas honestly, were talking about. In history, there've been a few handfuls of individuals that have tried to communicate these ideas, but what we've done is just distort and misunderstand what was being communicated.

When Jesus (reportedly) said: blessed are the meek... this is what he was talking about. When Nietzsche called this 'slave mentality' it was obvious he didn't understand it. Just like when the New Testament was given to the people, they proceeded to fuck up its meanings, and use it to further self-serving agendas. Historically, I mean. 'I love your Christ, your Christians not so much.'

I'm not just picking on Christians; all other forms of organization are equally guilty. That's not to say they are less, or stupid, but just not interested in looking harder—they don't WANT to know. It would negate all of their life's works and commitments.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday brushed aside accusations in a recent discredited report that President-elect Donald Trump had once cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow. While doing so, however, he managed to plug the local sex trade.

Trump is “a grown man,” Putin said, according to Bloomberg News, “and secondly he’s someone who has been involved with beauty contests for many years and has met the most beautiful women in the world … I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.”

__________________If you surrender a civilization to avoid social disapproval, you should know that all of history will curse you for your cowardliness - Alice Teller

If John of Patmos would browse the internet today for half an hour, I don't know if the Book of Revelations would be entirely different or entirely the same.

The personnel at the power company read this online and had a WTF moment, and tried to call the WashingtoncomPost. The comPost did not return the calls of the power company, and after a bit were forced to update their story.

The ability of people to hit the PrntScrn buttons on their keyboard for a screen shot created some further havoc as their sequence of "journalistic" screw ups were laid bare for the world to see.

Even though I had a technical bent in high school and an Engineering education in college I took some journalism courses. An infraction as slight as misspelling someones name would be an "F" for the piece, terribly wrong information like not confirming facts on a story like this would have been cause for expulsion from the class or program. But that was then and this is now.

__________________If you surrender a civilization to avoid social disapproval, you should know that all of history will curse you for your cowardliness - Alice Teller

If John of Patmos would browse the internet today for half an hour, I don't know if the Book of Revelations would be entirely different or entirely the same.

I think that determination is fairly straightforward. Despite this being a counterintelligence investigation the criminal charges that arise are being pursued as in any other criminal case. Flynn broke numerous laws, as did his son, and so his pleading guilty to a single charge of lying to the FBI and the deal that goes with it is almost certainly contingent on him A giving up others, B providing material proof of his testimony, and C operating under the understanding that if he does lie about anything else he and his son will be incarcerated for a very long time.

__________________

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